It Takes a Tribe

by Will Dean

  Earlier, I argued that I never had the sense at Harvard that most of the faculty understood the frame of mind required to create something from nothing. By definition, business schools mostly teach what has worked in the past. That kind of thinking can set itself against genuine innovation. It is essential in any business to have conservative voices that test new ideas against existing models. And as a business grows, it is also obviously necessary to try to put a lot of your efforts into optimizing what you do well. But that can never be your sole priority.

  In a business like Tough Mudder, where people expect the energy and novelty they experienced first time around to be exceeded on each subsequent engagement with the company, I think it is my role to make sure that those optimizing voices are balanced with more disruptive ones (quite often my own). I am lucky to have a CFO, Don Baxter, who rightly puts the optimization case eloquently. Often Don’s good sense prevails. But 95 percent of my creative and productive arguments with Don start with his insistence that new concepts be made to work inside existing frameworks and my feeling that we should sometimes rip up those frameworks and start again. Those arguments are always instructive, and they lend rigor to the process of change.

  Innovation must always be about creating a balance of voices that does not drown out risk. There are, of course, many more ways of putting people together than there are team-building ideas. Tom Kelley’s research offers a useful list of personality types that are necessary for productive innovation. He divides these qualities into three groups: the “learning personas” (including such types as “the anthropologist” who is constantly venturing out to interact with other groups), the “organizing personas” (including “the hurdler,” a “tireless problem solver who gets a charge out of solving something that has never been done before”), and the “building personas” (including “the storyteller,” who “captures our imagination with compelling narratives of initiative, hard work, and innovation”).

  I think personalities are contextual rather than fixed—we behave differently in different situations. In applying Kelley’s model to our innovation team, I viewed it, like all models, less as a how-to guide than a useful tool. In small teams, it is essential that people can adopt different roles in different situations—and also that team members are capable of recognizing that fact without getting too confused about the seemingly schizophrenic behavior their colleagues are displaying.

  Putting some of that spirit into practice—and remaining mindful that you learn through experience, not theory—we engaged Tom Kelley and IDEO to work with us back in 2011. The aim wasn’t just to have them come up with some ideas but also for us to get an insight into their processes and way of thinking. It was a great success. Though it didn’t necessarily lead to specific new obstacles, the IDEO design studio, in which everyone was invited to make things cheaply rather than discuss them in theory, became the model for our own Innovation Lab in Pennsylvania.

  The Lab—run by Nolan Kombol—is a warehouse space and a field in the glorious upstate countryside where we build and test obstacles. The site is on a farm owned by the Policelli family, the construction firm that not only creates our obstacles but is also closely involved in research and development. Duane Policelli, who with his family came to work with us full time in 2012, has the perfect résumé for Tough Mudder construction. He not only has a degree in engineering and five decades of experience in major construction projects, but he also grew up on this farm. He and his two brothers, third-generation Italian Americans, helped their father build the farmhouse on this land and then employed their construction skills in more experimental teenage projects. They built all manner of tree houses—some thirty feet up—rope swings, tunnels, a working paddleboat, and a submarine from fifty oil drums that—probably fortunately—was never successfully launched. They dammed the river (and inadvertently caused the neighboring farmer to airlift his cattle to safety); they experimented with all kinds of explosives and detonators (more scientifically in later life, once Duane had achieved his blasting license). Duane brings all this experience to bear in the ongoing challenge of creating new obstacles.

  In this sense, the Lab makes what we do in Pennsylvania sound somewhat more scientific than it is. The closest we have got to men in white coats and safety goggles was probably our experiments with homemade tear gas to create our recent Cry Baby challenge. (“It is,” as one of our “trialists” pointed out, “not often in life that you allow someone to spray you directly in the eyes with a random bottle of fluid. It is even less often that you would let that happen when the person holding the bottle is wearing rubber gloves and a mask.”) There’s no typical day for Nolan’s innovation team or for Duane’s construction unit. Half of the time they are traveling around the country reviewing the course designs, interacting with participants, and liaising with the course constructors on the ground. A lot of the rest of the time in Pennsylvania is spent working out the best possible way of squeezing between two barrels or running hard at a wall or putting your hands in an ice bucket. We approach these questions with proper rigor and suitable childlike enthusiasm. Each obstacle that makes it to a World’s Toughest Mudder and then to a Tough Mudder will have been through five stages of structured examination and filtering. The first stage is “ideation,” which is the concept-generating part, perhaps the hardest stage of all; the general idea is that everyone should bring something new to the table, and at this stage we try to leave judgment of the merits of those new things aside. Once we have all the ideas we can muster, a quick filtering process (stage two) discards those we as a group immediately see overwhelming problems with, whether in terms of logistics, cost, safety, or general disgust.

  Stage three starts in earnest after we have left those possibilities on the cutting-room floor and involves quickly building mock-ups of how the obstacles might look. We know from experience that it is crucial to think in concrete rather than abstract terms when innovating. Things that sound brilliant in theory often don’t add up to much in practice. Sometimes we use a 3-D printer to do this modeling, and other times we use materials on hand in Duane’s lumberyard and workshop. From this process, each year, we aim to have ten working models from which five will become a reality on the Tough Mudder course. Duane and his team construct these obstacles to scale, ready for testing.

  Stage four of our process is what we call alpha testing. This involves Tough Mudder employees from all parts of the business spending a couple days at the Lab to put the obstacles through their paces and give a sense of what excites them and what doesn’t. Nolan watches out for those obstacles that in practice best promote teamwork and those that create the most exclamatory enthusiasm; what we want to hear is, “We have just got to have that one!” A couple of the obstacles that produce none of these responses will be discarded, before beta testing from invited Mudder participants. The five best-performing obstacles will then form that year’s Tough Mudder innovations, though the process is never complete. The ongoing “anthropological” stage is to watch carefully how the obstacles cope with volumes of people and constantly reevaluate and modify.

  I like to think we are only ever as good as the obstacles we reject. Thomas Edison once said, “There is no such thing as failure, only ten thousand ideas that didn’t work.” Some obstacles are given up more reluctantly than others. Nolan keeps a file marked “crazy obstacle ideas.” It includes the following, mostly rejected before alpha testing:

  Spider Box: clear box crawl, with spiders, snakes, and scorpions on top

  Dutch Oven: low crawl through a pungent stink box; try to get through without vomiting

  Flying Squirrel: leap between two elevated platforms, with a large fan/net in the gap; must lay out like Superman in order to clear the gap, a pike jump will cause you to fall into the net

  Stormin’ Norman: charge toward a wall with tennis ball/paintball turrets aimed and shooting at you, the goal being to get through the 164-foot-long field without getting pegge
d and to navigate the low walls in which participants can hide along the way

  Don’t Go Chasin’ Waterfalls: reverse slip and slide, with a timed cascade of water dumped from the top every thirty seconds, race to the top without getting washed out

  Buried Alive: underground crawl/pit maze, through which you navigate in the pitch black; if you come out the wrong exit, you may get zapped

  Human Conductor: act as the human conduit between two live wires; make the connection to make a sound and light signal before you can proceed (uses same current as EST)

  Acid Rain: run through a container full of floating acid bubbles

  Nolan has a rule of thumb. If he, as a reasonably athletic thirty-year-old male, can’t successfully negotiate a new obstacle 50 percent of the time, it is too challenging; if he can do it more often than that it is probably too easy. If he vomits, it’s a sign to start again, do things differently. If he just about gets through it and wants to go back for more, it might be ready for the next stage of testing.

  Quite often these days, I talk to young entrepreneurs in various forums, and the most frequent question I am asked is: How do you create a culture of innovation? My answer to that question takes in some of the experience of the Lab. That trial is often about error. I tell the young entrepreneurs that if you’re not making mistakes, there are only two possible outcomes. Neither of them are good. The first possibility is that you are making mistakes and hiding them or are oblivious to them—and that’s a big problem. The other possibility is that you are not pushing yourself to change and improve—which will quickly become a big problem down the line. Punishing honest mistakes kills creativity.

  Mistakes are not an end in themselves, obviously, but unless you are risking enough to make them, you will never succeed. That risk can take many forms. Sometimes it is about the courage to challenge conventional wisdom. When I was working in counterterrorism there was a tendency among the highly educated strategists of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to assume that jihadists thought along the same sophisticated strategic lines as they did. It was a classic case of a highly networked and hierarchical organization confronting a loose and improvisational one. My most successful contributions involved going out on a limb to try to dismantle those preconceptions, to always try to go back to first principles and “Think different,” as Steve Jobs suggested.

  Another of the things I see quite often from supposedly creative people or teams is the belief that focus groups will give them the right answer. I commission more market research than anyone at Tough Mudder, but I always do so in the knowledge that it will only give you one aspect of the solution and may well be biased against radical change: people like what they know. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.”

  If you want to be radical, by definition you have to be doing something different.

  There are people who argue that you can’t have too big a diversity of opinions in the room for new thinking to emerge. I’m not sure that is true either. Polarized disagreement isn’t creativity. While it is crucial to tolerate plenty of possibility, there also has to be the prerogative of decision making. Not every idea has to be tested. Quite often it should be enough to say something won’t work—hence our second quick-rejection stage. A test version of every obstacle idea we have will cost ten thousand dollars, and I am not spending that to confirm what I know from instinct and experience.

  The best quick filter we have is to constantly test new ideas against Tough Mudder values. We want our obstacle innovation to be exciting, talk-worthy, and visual. Something that involves teamwork is better than something that doesn’t. And after that the crucial thing is this: never become too attached to your best ideas.

  One of the pieces of obstacle innovation that I am proudest of is Block Ness Monster, which we rolled out in 2016 and which has quickly become a Mudder favorite. The obstacle was originally called Twinkle Toes, had gone through all our processes—and we loved it. It was a series of pivoting balance beams semisubmerged in water designed for two people to cross together without falling in. When we installed Twinkle Toes, it received a lukewarm response: fun but nothing special. We looked at it again. The part that people enjoyed was not trying to navigate the beam in tandem but the difficulty they had in trying to get back on it once they had fallen in. That required real coordination and effort. We turned the idea inside out; we started the Mudders in the water and had them try to clamber over the rotating blocks. It turned out when you had a volume of people this could be achieved only through serious collaboration. Lots of butt pushing and hand holding and shouting and screaming. We now call Block Ness Monster our penicillin because we discovered it as if by accident.

  The other thing it reminded us of was that the innovation process itself was a story worth telling. We turned a camera on Block Ness and charted the good luck of its development. Tough Mudder as an event is designed to promote ingenuity and to develop problem solving. The mini documentary series we have on the Web site that shows us demonstrating our own problem-solving efforts has proved extremely popular. It also helps to reinforce the ingenuity of Nolan’s Innovation Lab. We used to shout a lot about how we had the best obstacles; the Lab proves it. You never have to ask whether James Bond has the best gadgets; it’s enough to know he has Q. Once you have seen Q in action the question becomes unnecessary.

  Innovation is catching. It is also, crucially, not confined to products. The real answer to that notion of “fostering innovation” is that it must be fundamental to everything you do, not only at the micro level but also at the macro level; “innovation” is really another word for growth.

  Sometimes that involves—as Tough Mudder requires—deliberately taking yourself beyond your comfort zone. When we started the company, we knew that we should not hesitate to expand to Britain and Australia. At Harvard we called it the “commonwealth strategy.” The idea was to enter countries that are similar to America and produce our events remotely.

  I was insistent that we went to Germany, too, because I knew it would force the company to push its own boundaries. We could not sit back and say, “Hey, let’s use our English-speaking North American marketing department for expansion.” We would need to develop new capabilities. The lessons learned from this evolution would make it easier for us to enter Japan and other less-familiar markets. It would build resourcefulness in our teams, and give us different frames of reference.

  In the past couple of years at our internal Tough Mudder University I’ve been teaching a couple of case studies with this deliberate stretching of boundaries in mind. One of them is Marvel Comics. There was a point in the 1980s at which Marvel appeared to have plateaued as a business. It was the most successful superhero comics company in the world. But that initial phase of creativity and growth on which the business had been built had stalled. There were only so many superhero comics that you could sell—keep adding more and you would create something like hero fatigue.

  Marvel recognized this and adopted a new strategy. They didn’t relinquish their core competency, which was in heroic storytelling, but instead they concentrated on developing many more channels—films, games, books, multimedia, and so forth—through which stories could be told and sold. Thus they transformed themselves from being a comic book company into a global media company, all strands of which connected directly back to the authentic core of what they were first good at. New channels brought a constant stream of new fans in. Marvel did not dilute its brand by expanding; they deepened and strengthened it.

  Having established Tough Mudder as an idea and an event that Mudders love, our next challenge—there is always a next challenge—has been similarly to multiply the ways that the Mudder challenge can be experienced, new ways in which people can connect with us and each other. I call these channels touch points. We have launched several variations on the original Tough Mudder theme: Mudderella, our women-o
nly event; TM5K, the streetwise version (that I still believe will become a big success); Mini Mudder for kids; and Mudder Half, which offers an entry-level challenge. It’s at the other end of the spectrum from World’s Toughest Mudder, but still an authentic test of grit and courage. This last year we have built further on those formats, rolling out Toughest Mudder, an overnight challenge run on a normal Mudder weekend, and Tougher Mudder, each with its own level of difficulty and exclusive obstacles. The family of events offers a way for many more people to experience what we do, without compromising the core offering.

  We have also long been thinking about creating a series of Tough Mudder studio gyms. I sometimes like to think of Tough Mudder itself as a kind of modern pilgrimage, something you prepare for and then eventually commit to with like-minded devotees once or twice a year. In that sense the Tough Mudder Bootcamp will be our church, a weekly habit, a place to hang out as well as work out, offering functional fitness and Tough Mudder camaraderie.

  In the spirit of build-measure-learn, we had some fun last year constructing a cool prototype of this Bootcamp space on one floor of TMHQ, as a showcase for franchisees. The other case study I’ve been teaching is the Apple Store model, which shows the value of creating spaces that are both showroom and sales channel, working models of our values. Six months on, the first gym franchises are already in operation.